 to you. Okay, so, you know, this is a very good chance for us to listen to Yorba Scullis. Hello, everyone. I'm Subir Sinha from the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Welcome to our webinar series, where we have so far focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected development worldwide. Thank you for making time to listen to this important lecture today. It is my pleasure to welcome Yorba Scullis, Professor of Political Ecology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, speaking on the topic of limits, degrowth, and environmental justice. Yorba is one of the world's foremost scholars of degrowth, an idea that has caught on in debates on climate change and environmental politics and policy, and is now also influencing debates within development studies. Yorba's early academic training is in chemistry and environmental engineering from Imperial College London. After working with the European Union in different capacities, most notably on the European Union Water Framework Directive, Yorba's took a PhD in environmental studies at the University of the Aegean in Greece. He has been a fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has worked with the eminent ecological economist Robert Norgaard. We were lucky to have Yorba's as a research fellow at our department at SOAS in 2015-16. For more than a decade since his arrival back in Barcelona, Yorba's has been writing about degrowth, and his books and articles are among the most cited works on this topic. Apart from numerous books, the latest of which is limits, why Malthus was wrong, and why environmentalists should care from Stanford University Press in 2019, he has written in and has been interviewed in major newspapers across the world, and his writings have been translated into a dozen languages, maybe more. They have massive implications for how development and growth are thought about and practiced. Before I give the floor to him, let me remind you that as with previous webinars, this one also will be recorded, and a recording will be placed on the department YouTube channel in the coming days. Also, please post questions in the chat, Yorba's and I will pick them up after he finishes speaking. So let me now pass the floor over to Yorba's. Welcome once again. We are really looking forward to what you have to say. Thank you, Subir, and I've made many Zoom presentations as all of you, I guess, these days. That's the first one that started wrong, but you know, and I think I'm going to survive it. Let me share if I can, if I can share my screen. Yes, perfect. So that's my presentation, which starts with a nice live image of a protest in Athens, Greece, from the good old days when we thought we're going to change the world. And this was before Sirius was elected, it was around, it was after it was elected, then we caught up with reality and we thought it was much more difficult to change things within the European Union, but it's still an image that for me captures the spirit of what I want to talk about, which is environmental justice. So I'm going to focus on three ideas from my research. It kind of captures the research that I've done the last, I could say, 10 or 12 years since I became a professor in Barcelona, for which a very formative period, although short, short, but formative was the one year I passed as a Liverpool visiting professor at SOS, where many of the ideas that you're going to hear here, my book on limits that I'm going to talk about, and also my first book on degrowth were conceived, this was the place where I motivated, this is where I decided to write the books, and this is where I started working on them, so I'm really happy to be virtually back at SOS. I'm going to communicate three ideas, they might seem a little bit disjointed, but they are not, I hope you will see me interweaving the connections. The first idea is that limits and limited growth are two sides of the same coin that perpetuates injustices in the name of progress. We've come to think of the debates about growth and limits as two opposite poles, and I'm going to argue that, to one extent, a particular understanding of limits and growth are two sides of the same coin. I'm going to then talk about why the overdeveloped economies of Europe and North America, to be a little bit geographically specific and not use the global north or high-income countries, why they need to degrow, and then I'm going to finish by saying how I understand environmental and climate injustices as systemic features of capitalist growth. Along this presentation, I'm going to give you, let's say, snapshots from different fieldwork experiences that I have that I work with water and land use conflicts, and my more macro-ecological economic work. It's going to be a little bit of a travel through my own personal research trajectory these years, which I hope I will be able to illustrate with some formative fieldwork experiences. First of all, a few definitions. We're not everyone from the same field or trained in the same thing, so it's good to start with some working definitions. And by environmental justice, I mean a fair and equitable share of environmental goods and damages, crucially a fair share of the cost of climate change, what we might call climate justice. Now, when I said overdeveloped economies, I didn't use this term accidentally. I meant those economies that have used more than their fair share of the planet in terms of resources and energy. And by the growth, apart from a general critique to the idea of a one-way future consisting only of growth, I mean, and more specifically, a slowing down of the part of the economies of production consumption that it's environmentally damaging, and it's part of how the overdeveloped economies are condemning the rest of the world into a future of climate and more generally environmental and planetary breakdown. So the progress will be my three ideas, followed by a short conclusion where I bring the things together. So let me start with a formative fieldwork experience. If you hear any babies crying around the way, I think it's the Zoom situation of our days. I have two twin daughters, one year old, so it's really difficult to keep them guarded. And our house here in Barcelona is not very big, so you might hear them scream here and there, but everything is under control, don't worry. So the first idea, limits and unlimited growth as two sides of the same coin that perpetuates injustices in the name of progress. And my formative experience is from Atadepeira, which is a small town a few kilometers north of our campus outside of Barcelona. If you sit at the town square for a coffee, you would think you are in any other Spanish village. It looks like a Spanish village. Yet this is the town with the highest income in the whole of Spain. If you walk off the square, as I walked when I first visited the place together with a team of researchers that we did this project I'm going to talk about, you'll find yourself in a Spanish Beverly Hills. It's full of villas with high walls, angry dogs, swimming pools and ceaseless sprinklers. The locals will tell you that Saquira and Piquel live somewhere around there, but I've heard that about all the post suburbs in Barcelona, so no one really knows where Saquira and Piquel live, but it's the kind of place where Saquira would live, you can imagine what I mean. I was there back in 2010 when I was dressed in Barcelona and I was there with a team of conservation scientists and historians, and we were studying water conflict and land use during Spain's civil war and Franco's dictatorship. We did the research first of the city archives to find the information related to these water and land conflicts. We collected oral histories from elders, and we documented with CIS, that's an example here, and the satellite images, the conversion of what used to be an agrarian landscape, you can see it here in the 1940s, into a leafy suburb. My conservation scientists friends were interested in this transformation, not that it's urbanization, but at the same time it's a peculiar greening, where an agrarian landscape, which was drier, it's transformed into this leafy suburb, you can't really see the suburb, but this white dot you see on the 2007 picture is the type of village you're showing my picture. And we were asking as a team of researchers, together with historians, how did this happen, and most importantly, and that's the part where I came in, that was my expertise at the time, what was the role of water and controlling water in this process of this peculiar elite suburbanization and transformation of the landscape. In our story that we published at the Journal of Ecological Economics, we found that landed the elites privatized water after the Spanish Civil War by controlling water, they managed to finally kick the peasants off the common lands, parceling fields for real estate. There was a perennial conflict between peasants and landowners, and landowners always wanted to push kind of early touristification and suburbanization on the place. And we saw that this conflict came at their peak and they were resolved violently during the Spanish Civil War, and it was Franco's guns that killed alternatives both for the water system and the land use distribution in the area of the republicans and of the peasants, that the republican and peasant parties were related at the time in Catalonia. And we explained in our article how this violent, primary violent force of, you might call it primitive accumulation or dispossession with the force of the guns, made possible an urbanization of the countryside that from the today's perspective seems natural and almost inevitable. If you ask even locals, they will tell you, yes, that was meant to happen here, you know, it's a beautiful place, it was supposed to be a suburb for its people to pass initially their summers and then make it their homes. Madalena here, we did the Noral History as I told you, remembers how her family was forced out to make space for a vacation home. Only a few owned the land, she says, and they sold the entire thing for second residences. We were all Serk ropers, we had nothing of our own, and they forced us out from everywhere. That was about it. She was born in 1933, she talks about the process that starts around then in her childhood, and it's completely in the 1950s. Mingo here, another Serk roping family, born in 1930, she says, we did nothing and they kicked us out from our home. The owner, which was also the town's mayor, the owner of the land of his family, told to my father, it does not matter whether you have a contract or not, it is useless. Houses are houses, that's exactly how we put it. This is a little bit to give you the feeling of the place and what happened then. What struck me during our research there as a water scholar, someone who was interested in water, was how this violence and injustice was erased from memory by a hegemonic story of progress. Even the people who suffered from the violence would tell you today that at least it was for the better. And this progress was defined as a victory in a war against nature and against scarcity, primarily water scarcity. So there was a discourse of progress as more and more water. And here, aside from the work of the history of the town, that is written from a local historian who is also critical, let's say, of Franco and the Francoist regime. But even him would write, in reality, this town has become a new town. All this wonder of progress has been possible thanks to water. And let's pray to God, he's Catholic, he's anti-Francoist but Catholic apparently, the flow of rivers is maintained and increased every day. Where do these rivers go? They go mostly to swimming pools we found with the research we did there. Time and again, I found in the archives that elite, even at the time of this conflict, sold the story of water as being naturally limited, legitimating their projects of expansion, while presenting themselves as saviors in a battle against the common enemy of scarcity. Yet Matta de Perra, we argue in the article, with some 675 millimeters of rain every year, is not by any means an arid place. Water was scarce, we argue, for real estate development. But this development was not natural or necessary. It was a political and economic project. Elites throughout the time told the story of natural limits, I came to realize through this research, to justify their plans of unlimited urban growth. And that's a lesson that I developed into a bigger story with my subsequent research that started actually in the year that I spent up to us and I want to talk about. So in my recent book, I engage with the story that since the 1970s, environmental debates are trapped in a supposed binary. On the one hand, we have the supposed Malthusians who defend limits against economists or eco-modernists who defend growth. That's the story I was trained as an ecological economist of the debate of the limits to growth taking place since the 1970s. In my book Limits that I published last year by Stanford University Press, I argue instead that limits to growth and unlimited growth are two sides of the same coin. Like in Matadepera, a specter of limits constantly is mobilized to justify capitalism, otherwise senseless and unjust pursuit of unlimited growth. Consider the myth of scarcity, I write in the book, the central foundation of mainstream neoclassical economics. Our wants, economists tell us in their models and in their stories that they teach us if we are unlucky to study mainstream economics, our wants are theoretically limitless. Therefore, the world is by definition limited. Don't worry though, we are told. We can always allocate resources efficiently, and that's our job as economists to find how to allocate resources efficiently, so as to grow the economy and satisfy ever more wants while always living within a planet of scarcity. Turning this history of economics thought upside down, I show in my book how the first defense of unlimited growth in the name of limits is found in Malthus in famous S.A.M. population. And there was a lance that I had with Gareth Dale, a scholar who first wrote this counterintuitive story of what Malthus argued in the essay, a lance I had while it saw us and a friend I made while I was in London, but brought to my attention this alternative reading of Malthus that I developed in my book, and I think it's a very different story than the one we are constantly taught about what Malthus said and what he argued. In my book, I show that Malthus is supposedly a prophet of limits in the overpopulation, but if you go and actually read the essay, because most of us, let's be honest, we don't read the actual essay of Malthus. We read the stories about the essay and we say, okay, good luck now going and read the actual Malthus essay. Like we don't read, many of us don't read the wealth of nations. I have to accept that I know a lot about others, but I haven't read yet the wealth of nations. And I haven't read it because I didn't want to make a research intervention of the wealth of nations, but I wanted to make a research intervention on Malthus, S.A.M. and Malthus, and I did read the essay very carefully. And if you do that, you will see that a lot of what you've heard about this essay is very different actually. So Malthus, for example, did not think that there are any limits to food, whose production he wrote may increase forever. He didn't think also that there are any limits to commodities either. He said we can create them to as great quantities as we want. And the happy nation is one whose population grows as close as possible to a geometric rate. Economic models today like Malthus at his time assume that humans have unlimited wants, that we maximize consumption or utility in the disciplines that are going today. Likewise, Malthus, the first professor of economics actually, assumes that our nature is to have children without limits, even as people around him, and for centuries, plant their families and the size of their families pretty well. Assuming that geometric growth is natural, Malthus constructed the fantasy world of eternal scarcity. One where, as he wrote, and I think this phrase captures the whole essence of his argument, there is not enough for everyone to have a decent share. And that's basically the dictum of economics ever since Malthus. The poor in this Malthusian world are those who, by the nature of things, are left without a piece of the pie. Don't help them, he warned. Only the fear of hunger pushes them to work hard and grow the pie for everyone, including themselves. Increase the produce of the country he wrote, and here is the prophet of growth. Increase the produce of the country, and this will help them. Any other way of helping the poor will be cruel and tyrannical. And by that, he meant the redistribution that was taking place right at that time in the French Revolution. So against the idea of redistribution of the French Revolution, he wanted the economic growth. If this sounds familiar, it should be familiar. That's economics since then. By turning capital in social production of scarcity into the natural state of things, economists ever since Malthus explain away the continuing presence of poverty amidst plenty. There is simply not enough they tell us, not yet at least. We have to work harder and grow the economy one notch more. In my book, I claim that environmentalists, emphasizing the limitedness of Earth, play into this game of economists. If the world is limited, it is the natural response. The natural response has always been escape and conquest, growth and colonization, geoengineering and landing in Mars. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the moment environmentalists supposedly really realized we live in a limited planet was the very moment we were escaping this planet to go to moon now. It's a constant interplay and dialectic between limits and escape, limits and growth. I argue instead in the book that only when we own and by we, I mean environmentalists, the choice of limits and stop attributing limits to a stage in nature or our unquenchable selves, will we start sharing and finally limiting ourselves within an abandoned other ways and the generous planet. Indeed, for radical environmentalists from the romantic movement, which were the harshest critics of Malthus at his time, to the anarcho-feminist of Emma Goldman, to 1970s dreams or the degrowth movement, today I would say limits are not an undesirable external imposition. They are a moral and political project that goes hand in hand with equality and justice. I call this a project of collective self-limitation. Society structured on an instinct of limit, not unlimited expansion. If our needs, our consumption, our reproduction can be limited, then scarcity is a myth. Everyone can and must have a decent share, because there is already enough against what Malthus said. And the hero in my book is Emma Goldman, who actually was arguing for the right of women to control their bodies, control how many children they have. And not because we were running out of things or the planet could not hold so many of us, but he said, because only this way we're going to stop the capitalist machine that wants us women to produce cheap workforce. That's the only way to stop the imperial machines that want us to produce soldiers. And that's also the only way we can have to enjoy sex without being disciplined by the yoke of motherhood. So it was a liberatory movement based on a self-limitation, limiting something in order to liberate ourselves from something, liberate ourselves from the yoke of motherhood, liberating ourselves from capitalism. In my book also I read classical Greece. I'm Greek by the way, and we Greeks like to go back to classics every now and then. I was told that this is not very cool to do in this era that Greece is considered as the hard banger of Europe and colonization, but I still think that Greece we're not responsible for the colonization of the Anglos. So I still reclaim my right as a Greek to go back to some good things, people who lived in the same territory with me. I don't know if I'm very descendant or not. I don't think so. But anyways, I like to go back to some good ideas and I found that one of them I think is that they took limits seriously. Ancient Greeks invented money and they lived through the first disasters of compound debt. They developed in response, I saw in the book, a moral philosophy of limitedness, democracy, tragedy and their ethic of moderation, which was proliferating everywhere, where all institutions argue of self-limitation, a culture of limits and institutions of limits that we so badly lack in our era of runaway global warming. A combination of sufficiency and egalitarian sharing is what I understand as degrowth. And I use here a slogan for degrowth that has been attributed to Gandhi, although it's not Gandhi, but it captures Gandhi and thought, which is living simply so that others may simply live, not living simply just to avoid climate breakdown or living simply so that we live a happier life, but also that we give space to others to live. The root of these ideas of degrowth are interconnected, I think, with economics and ideas that come from other parts of the world, from Gandhi and Kumarappa in India and the notions of when we were Eastern or African philosophies. These are all concepts and ideas that have been covered in this wonderful book by a Ciskotarian colleagues, The Pluriverse. And I would put degrowth, not as the overarching keyword of this Pluriverse, but one, one that has been created in Mediterranean Europe, a Western keyword, that it's one among the many keywords that we can use to think about alternatives to a one-way future of development-based growth-based development. So let me move to my second argument about degrowth. And here I will change a little bit and start giving numbers and figures and graphs, so make a little bit of mindset change. And then in my last part of the presentation, I'm going to go back to political ecology. I'm a little bit binary in this way of thinking. So I do a little bit of ecological kind of economics, not exactly economics, but it's kind of economics. And then I do political ecology. So for someone else, this might feel a little bit a switch of speeds in the presentation, but please bear with me because I think the figures and the arguments will be slightly interesting. So a recent study by Jason Hickel finds that G8 nations are responsible for 85% of global CO2 emissions in excess of 350 ppms. And climatologists Alice Boz-Larkin and Kevin Anderson calculate that high-income nations must reduce their emissions 10% every year in line with the first of a two-degrees carbon budget. So if high-income nations are serious about doing their bit about climate change, they have to reduce emissions 10% every year. And yet these same economies want to grow 2% to 3% every year, doubling every 20 years or so, 10 times bigger by the end of the century, straight into an irrational infinity. This is what the graph of global GDP looks like at the growth rate of 3% it's here. It's good to remind what this innocent 3% it's here looks like compared 2018 to 200. Look what we expect, not just the circulation of capital, difficult does it be to be absorbed and create investments to be, but imagine also the circulation of resources, energy that will be to sustain this economy. Compound growth is the madness of the economic reason David Harvey wrote and I couldn't agree more than that. So maybe green growth then increasing GDP at this crazy infinity rate, which is crazy so it's not possible, but okay there is this whole rhetoric of green growth increasing GDP while reducing resources and emissions. In a review of recent resource models we find with Jason Hickel that in all scenarios available by the UNEP and by others who claim that green growth is possible, but if you look at the actual scenarios, global resource use increases alongside the GDP till 2050 as it have done more or less until now. So no one foresees any separation between GDP and resource use. So not greening at all growth, yes, but not green growth. IPC's climate models square growth with 1.5 degrees that we agreed in some in Paris only by assuming and that's the recent innovation it's to imagine that there are some technologies and proven and untested for the time being of negative emissions that it's bioenergy with carbon capture that at some point in the future will start taking carbon out of the atmosphere. This is the brown and yellow parts you see in these scenario graphs that basically take out carbon that otherwise is overshot in all of these scenarios. Whether this will be possible, it's coming. It hasn't been tested at any scale and the best calculations is that just the land we will need to do these forestation projects will be three times the size of India. So you can imagine about what land use and food sovereignty conflicts we are talking about if this was ever to happen. Tellingly the only IPCC model and that's the first one the P1 that doesn't assume so much of these untested technologies assumes instead then dramatic degrowth in energy use unlike anything seen in the past. Ecomodernists celebrate the supposed dematerialization the calling of high income countries pointing to reductions in domestic resource use the red lines alongside GDP growth the blue lines yet this is an artifact of globalization if you look at the material footprints the green lines that is the total resources that used in a nation to produce the good the nation consumes that is including the imports including the goods that they are produced in time and the resources they use and that with an import then you see no decoupling whatsoever from GDP so we see the same picture resource use and GDP growing hand in hand and this makes sense because in a globalized economy we would expect the picture within the nations to represent the same pictures that we show for the world as a whole now it is true that 21 countries including UK that you might have read in the news US or France have reduced their carbon footprints between 2000 2014 even though their economies grew and this is after taking imports into account but note that these reductions were close to one to two percent per year nowhere near the necessary 10 percent that we said it's needed year after year in mind you also that all these economies experienced low GDP growth since 2000 this is why we called them for period after 2008 of secular stagnation so the average GDP growth is close to one to two percent average per year if the growth was three percent there wouldn't be any reduction in carbon emissions which was one percent every year if the global economy covers from COVID the way it did in 2008 then we will overshoot the two degree climate temperature change paths within a decade we foreseen models we made with Alyosa Slamar-Kazakh my student and down on a colleague from Leeds even an ambitious global mitigation plan what we call here a green deal the yellow line in our graph resembling a little bit the green deal of the European Union fails to keep global emissions within two degrees the blue shaded area the only recovery path that could stay within the envelope of two degrees of climate change of temperature change is the green line in the graph and this is a scenario that combines fast decarbonization reduced energy use and crucially zero GDP growth in the global north so that's a really challenging scenario but that's what we try this challenge is that we try to capture with a word that it's not easy to digest and it's the word deep growth we lack of growth cause unemployment how do we finance clean energy without growth will inequalities increase i mean these are all very valid questions and unfortunately it's not the questions that economists mostly are engaged with most of them assume growth i mean recently i tried to do a project on the green you deal without growth and i talked very interesting and brilliant heterodox economists my student talked to brilliant heterodox economists all of them were surprised by our assumption that we said okay let's think how would we finance it if there was no growth i said no growth how is this possible no there will be growth because of a green you deal we said okay what if there isn't you know what what do we do then even even that was too much to consider but that's a research agenda i try to push with my colleague it's my research agenda policies for the growth for example with nicole sasfor from the mi team we showed how a reduction of working hours can increase employment and leisure while reducing emissions with tilman hartley and urumband de berg we assessed redistributive policies for increasing the equality without growth and there are many things and options we can think there from wealth taxes and maximum income limits to universal basic income or making workers owner owners of the companies they work for now you might say okay nice nice paper ideas you have there and of course the problem with what we are discussing here is not policies but politics and no matter how ecologically necessary i might argue or convince you that the growth is politically you will still argue it seems impossible so in a recent book the case for the growth we try to do a little bit confront this challenge and think of what a reasonable political strategy would look like and we try to articulate the different forms it might take through protest direct action reform and also prefiguration linking what we call the personal the communal and the political but there are all three levels where we have to act and articulate our actions and the model we proposed one of building new common senses a concept uh many of you given the triad so as you would know that we take from antonio brancy and how through cultural changes embodied and practiced in the making and defense of new commons and articulating new common senses we can articulate that into a political project that promotes these commons and creates structures of living without growth now this might sound a little bit theoretical but of course we all theorize based on what we experience and what we've experienced is a tentative limited you might call it failed but what is not failed in this world in this planet now experience of barcelona in common the political platform that emerged from the ignado squares here in barcelona and which articulated common senses that they were already diffusing in the alternative economy of the city that became a social movement in the squares and then articulated as a political movement to control of the city and opened new spaces for cooperative and alternative economies in the city critics from the right wing call it the party of the growth i wish it was the party of the growth and it really isn't but at least it is a party that can inspire us for what the politics of the growth could look like and that's just to show that it articulates many of the common senses that we articulate with our academic work this is the an advertisement that the party barcelona in common published last year and it says there is enough for everyone if we share it and actually that was the very the very main thesis of my book limits you know and it hasn't been translated in spanish or katana so it's not that they took it from me but it is i think i took it from the vibes of the city and that's a little bit to think also of how engage scholars that might work now absorbing the ideas that there are coming from the places we think so my third and final idea and i'm i have 10 minutes i realized to finish so i have to speed it up is about environmental and climate injustices as systemic features of capitalist growth which will not be a surprise for people like you at sauce but i want a little bit to share with you some of the field work through which i've made this point so again to start from a field work experience this is a picture from the seahan river plain in the southern coast of turkey which looks like a pastoral landscape for most of the year if you walk there in late spring you will see people as far as your eyes can see cramped in makeshift tents next to streams waiting in long lines to use restaurants working 10 hours a day for $1 an hour till the dead heat of the summer seasonal migrants of Kurdish origin they come there from the eastern depths of turkey and they harvest water melons making barely enough money to pass the winter with their families back home my student a turkish student etham canturhan he traveled to the seahan river basin and talked to workers under the suspicious eyes of the local police but they don't like to talk into Kurdish workers you can imagine and we were starting their programs of the UNDP and the turkish government to help ostensibly seasonal workers adapt to climate change extreme heat events were found to pose more heat strokes every year among seasonal workers and diseases thrived in the next six settlements adaptation of the UNDP and the turkish government included a cemented settlement for pre-made tents new bathrooms and the charity clinic where doctors check workers daily for disease or heat stroke and workers have to register there with the ids so that health authorities kept track of them in our paper where we reported on this experience and published a global environmental change we argue that this is not adaptation but maladaptation is adaptation that increases the vulnerability of vulnerable people and the turkish government is acting biopolitically to use a term from itself it's logic is one of controlling the circulation of people and commodities for the profitability of capital helping temporary farm workers adapt indeed we found would be easy the government could give them access to health and benefits available to normal workers it could remove the intermediaries and let workers unionize and get decent pay or it could allow workers if they wanted to settle with families for the duration of of that they wanted in the area of course none of this is allowed to happen and it won't happen because the goal we argued is not to help and make more resilient as the UNDP argues the seasonal workers but to keep a cheap docile and mobile labor healthy just enough to survive the heat and to work in the fields coming for the growing season and it's swiftly living after without settling uninsured paid below the minimum and without complaining and of course carefully monitored in case there are any curdisadvitators the historical discrimination of ethnic curds here meets the logic of capital treating seasonal workers exceptionally maintains the prices of turkish watermelons low enough to be competitive in what is a cat's road global market and it maintains that under conditions of climatic change so capital here we find is adapting well to climate but not people somewhat comparable was the situation we studied in river of rotas in southern Greece with my colleague Panadiota Cochilla where we were studying why malaria eradicated in Greece in the 1970s was making a comeback austerity cuts in mosquito control and the hotter climate caused an explosion of new cases of malaria and the government right wing at the time this is a road test the government right wing at the time and unfortunately also now blame the epidemic on seasonal workers from Pakistan there to pick oranges with quite racist discourses are in situ political ecology review on the instead how underpaid seasonal workers who would not afford the exorbitant rents local starts for rooms lift cramped with family in the masses where malaria mosquito strived lack of access to hospitals and fear of deportation stopped workers from reporting symptoms seasonal workers remained invisible until malaria threatened Greece tourist and there's nothing worse you can do to Greece to the Greek government and threatening the tourist revenue so then the state took action and targeted the migrants again biopolitically in the same sense that we found in Turkey othering the migrants and framing the disease as an imported anomaly that should not worry tourists while using the pretext of a health crisis to control the movements of workers even more tightly making sure they pick oranges they are paid low and then they go this racialized othering that we observed in Greece like in Turkey was not only a matter of nationalist fascist or xenophobic mindsets which of course it was but it was also functional to capital accumulation growth racism in other words keeps the labor of an exploited other seed so and this is the paper we published on this so in my 2018 book the growth conceived and started being written while at so as I politicized I hope what and otherwise was up to them and a political debate around limits to growth I showed how from its onset at the factories of Manchester and the plantations of the Americas economic growth is predicated on the violent exploitation of cheap others humans and non-humans racial ethnic and gender hierarchies secure and unpaid or underpaid labor force from which surplus is extracted surplus invested to make more surplus and which is the face that this takes and the ideology with which it's shown as being to the benefit of everyone is the ideology of economic growth and the ideology of progress which is also what I encountered in my very first Facebook that I talked about in Matavetana in Catalonia I didn't talk about a lot about gender but gender is a is a core concern in the book and increasing on my own research and teaching so the role of undervalued care labor mostly perform performed by women unpaid in the household is crucial in this story of economic growth and I follow here Sylvia's Federici's insights who showed how separating women from the control of the bodies was crucial for capital's original accumulation as crucial as was the separation of laborers from their commons and it's very interesting that this separation of women takes place around the period that Malthus is writing so this is where a little bit before Federici locates this process of violent dispossession of women and the violent pre-pronatal policies that capitalist states impose in order to have a population growth that they were lacking and that was putting an obstacle to early capitalism and it's precisely this population growth that Malthus still wants to maintain but at the same time he wants to maintain the poor discipline and it is interesting to see the links there know how the dispositions and the over reproduction of human force that capital was needing and was producing was theorized by early apologists of capitalists in terms of growth in terms of limits and scarcity that we can only respond to with growth and that was Malthus. Let me close very briefly in the two minutes that I have left by weaving the connections between the different parts of my research I presented here so if we want to understand social and environmental injustices like the ones I presented here I argue we have to focus on the systemic force that demands the chipping of people and their environments and this force has a name capitalist and the cause of the chippening is the inexorable need of capital to grow without limit 3 per cent per year all the way to the madness of infinity this growth is only possible by shifting costs to racialized others out of you or to the future and to this impossible goal of compound growth more and more is sacrificed public health and education systems that we build with so much effort and pain the very well-being of our planet and of our communities and the very well-being of our descendants. To think of escape routes we need to start by looking at the actual people fighting to limit capital and growth and I didn't talk much about that here apart from the very quick reference to the Barcelona movement. We need to focus on those who struggle to block mines and oil pipelines those who work for food sovereignty and present agriculture those who reclaim the commons in the cities and I think an important scholar work here for political ecologists is to think carefully how these disparate fights can be connected and are being connected into a broader social and political movement but finally manages to make openings and bring social environmental and climate justice we might call this a movement on a global environmental justice or an environmentalism of the commons. I leave this open for discussion and I thank you very much for your attention and again I apologize for the technical blitzes at the beginning. Thanks. Thank you so much Yorgos that was a fabulous talk and so much that you brought in from history and archival research in Spain and wide-ranging in terms of your going back to certain debates all the time from all the way from Malthus. The first question which has been posted and actually quite interestingly this question was posted before you talked about the sort of you know about the anti-natalist position. Here is Kasha she's saying from your mention of Goldman, Emma Goldman, how would you describe the relationship between the concept of degrowth and environmental anti-natalism, the philosophical position that advocates not having biological children in order to limit the detrimental human impact on the environment for example the birth strikers. That's a tough question that I expect from Sohas that's good. Yes we thought you might be missing Sohas. I was expecting something easier. I just had twins by the way where a lot to come and I really suffered to have them. I mean it took me took us a lot of time and I'm old so I can't say that I'm not personally an anti-natalist and I think the most intense happiness I've had in my life is having these two children so it would be difficult for me to advocate an anti-natalism as a position but what I advocate in my book what I call is limitation it's a posture of an instinct of limitation which means an instinct of each one it's one of us defining our own limits. So carefully thinking yes how many children we would like to have or how many children would make sense to have if none that's also an acceptable posture although it's not one that I took or that I would take. So my question is to put this question of limits at the center. I think in terms of of limiting the number of children we see that in in European countries this is already happening I mean it's very rare that someone would not have these considerations nowadays. Of course it is a question of women having the right to make this decision and a birth strike also I think the way Emma Goldman has decided is a reasonable tool as long as it has a political dimension where I would draw the line would be I wouldn't accept I mean it's a longer discussion I would accept it as a political tool or as a political stance of confronting capitalism the way the way Emma Goldman put it but I would be more reluctant to have it in a environmentalist let's live earth alone mindset because I think there it can take a potentially more dangerous politically direction. Yeah sure Kashi has just corrected me she's from Cambridge not from Suas thank you and while other people are thinking about the questions you know let me just ask a couple of things on you know on two sort of interesting ways in which you seem to be thinking about the limits one is the sort of creative ways in which people might limit themselves and I think you make a distinction between individual and sort of communal kind of and even global or planetary forms of limitation and the other is the limitation of nature or of human bodies themselves. Is there a distinction and particularly in light of let us say you know what has been said about the pandemic at the moment that we should think in terms of limiting growth in order that there should be boundaries between human populations and you know wildlife was one of the suggestions that was made that we should put limits on capitalist agriculture and so forth that you know so I get very much and I appreciate very much your sort of point with which you started which was that you know sort of limits and growth are not opposite to each other but are two sides of the same coin I just wonder if these are also two sides of the same coin at one level in the sense that the natural limits as you suggest force us to think in terms of more conscious forms of self-limiting. Yes I'd like to think of our interaction with the natural world that's co-evolving and also to think of the destruction we bring to a world that it's otherwise abandoned so I start from a premise of abundance it's also the way many pre-capitalist civilizations started from the way they saw the world so they didn't see it as limited or as scarce and so it was abandoned and of course to realize that we are destroying this abundance we are destroying it with capitalist agriculture we are destroying it with climate change etc. So there is a let's say natural science input that it's coming from there which is documenting our destruction and which is informing the quest for our self-collective self-limitation so in that sense yes I don't like though and here I have struggled to convince my fellow environmental scientists environmental scientists and friends you know I don't want to to to frame this as a question of natural limits of earth that are asking from us to respect them you know because I think I think this this precise framing of seeing the world as bounded limited and limiting us in some particular ways it has been part and parcel of the story that a set of capitalists from the very beginning and within the capital civilization that we live it creates the opposite impetus which is how can we overcome these limits and this is the constant this is the prevalent discourse right now it's from how we can fix climate change with hydrogen energy nuclear energy geoengineering you hear it and then to the most extreme is like already thinking how can escape earth and go to mars now there are already people with money and capital who are thinking along these lines so my question is to put some people say ethical I don't like the ethical I think it's a political question it's like what do we want to do and what do we want to do is to collectively limit limit ourselves and limit capital by limiting ourselves thanks there are two questions for you in the chat if you want to pick up there's one from jul how exactly could we avoid the danger of recession in our system in setting the pace for a system de-centered from growth and then one from zheng how do you think that de-growth concept is helpful for achieving low carbon development yeah no these both are what I'm saying are questions there are research questions they are political questions and they are the things that I would like us to talk about so as a minimum what I see my role as being is to setting these questions so that the other brilliant minds because my mind is not that brilliant I mean it is as brilliant as anyone else is in this room and it's brilliant up to a point no so I can't answer everything just because I'm the first I'm the one among the first one that said like people you know like compound growth is madness I mean David Harvey said it too and many others said like we need to think about the growth it's not possible that we can answer everything to defend that I mean one is the diagnosis we need to talk about that we need to talk about alternatives to growth then it's we need to start putting this question so one very good question is like how do you manage without growth and that's a question that the fellow ecological economist Peter Victor has put down 10 years ago he approached it as an economist with models what working time reductions could work and maintain a meaningful employment even within a contraction of the economy etc right now no recessions are terrible I would be stupid to say no no but the question is like can we start talking researching and experimenting with how do we manage in recession times and this is not just a theoretical concern right now with the covid lockdowns this is what's happening right now governments are experimenting with economic tools that they were considered theoretical before and it was only radicals proposing them they more or less experiment with them in order to maintain the system afloat in a period of forced depression no that still hasn't fully reached us no so we haven't experienced a great depression yet because there are all these tools that somehow manage the system a little bit afloat in this period now how is this done is it done with incredible indebtedness is it done with a quantitative reason that cannot be maintained beyond these two or three years it's going to explode after I don't have the answers but I'm saying these are the important questions now how can we manage these periods of contraction sustainably and this is the second question is it helpful for achieving low carbon development again it's easier to imagine decarbonization we think if we get richer and we have more money to spend etc but the problem is the more the economy produces you know the more it starts using also the other resources and the other fossil fuels that it uses while also inventing in renewable energy that's the story until now we have renewable energy is growing and also fossil fuels growing together so I think yes the growth like a slower output of a big part of the economy plant a contraction of part of the economy that has to to degrow from fossil fuels to to big-scale infrastructures etc it is it is helpful for a low carbon transition and it will give more time and space for renewable energies also to to take their space there's a question from priya roji priya roji do you want to yes unmute yes and there you go yes yeah I think it was easier to rather speak as opposed to tap it out because not yet a developed question thank you very much it was an excellent presentation um I guess it's like a challenge I have or a question the context of climate change is global so there's only one earth everyone inhabits the same earth using I totally get the view of asking those who consume the most carbon and the most resources to reduce those but are we perhaps like only focusing on one part of it and saying well okay it's great to reduce to get these big polluters etc to decrease and de uh degrow their economies and thereby reducing their carbon footprints what impact does that have on for example countries like Africa or countries in the global south um should we be using growth as an outcome so should we rather just be doing the right things instead of continuously trying to measure it because what I'm understanding is what we're trying to do is implement long-term actions to deliver a result over the long term and like every time every year every quarter measuring an outcome that's actually short term so we kind of like mix in the two and and I said it's a question or critique it's more of a I have these questions um and to me like I'm thinking about it more I'm from South Africa so like thinking about it in in an African context how can we think about not growth um another word insert new word for whatever that is to me it's like that would be partly trying to get us there and degrowth is one of those options or like asking the continent to degrow is like kind kind of juxtaposed thank you pretty yeah these are all excellent points and yes the the idea of the growth is not to it's not to to start measuring GDP and trying to degrow it year after year that's far from from the idea because it is a critique to the whole mentality of GDP and measuring the economy in terms of GDP which we know is a terrible indicator in many ways um the idea is to getting the right thing done but it is to getting the right thing done as we said with with with the honesty that we realized that getting this thing done it's going to have important economic repercussions that it's not just a matter of a technological fix so to use the analogy sometimes this analogy doesn't work well but if we use the analogy to the epidemic right now you know it was I mean you knew that if you had to do a lockdown this is going to have an impact on the economy you couldn't keep going around and saying like you know what we're going to have a lockdown but don't worry people the economy is going to continue working like it's working so we needed to to act on the virus and we need that this is going to have some economic repercussions and then the governments to the extent that they did they didn't do it exactly and they could have done much much more now how to reallocate resources how to make sure that people are supported in this difficult period how to make sure that the important goods are produced are provided to people at low cost so there were many things that we would like to go into but for me that's the model of what needs to be done with climate change I don't mean lockdown because there's no problem of going outside of our house as far as carbon emissions are concerned but there is like an awareness that you know we have to intervene also in the economic sphere and we can't keep pretending that the economic sphere will just keep going as it's going growing and then we'll just kind of make some fix on the side so again when we did the lockdown we didn't say we want to reduce the economy six percent but it decreased this year but that was the outcome precisely of of doing what needed to be done with the epidemic and not fully actually so that's one part now about South Africa I would say yes I think a very important question there is like this discourse that I said about degrowth what alternative discourses to development does it speak to my good colleague at friend Jason Hickel who is from the region also he's precisely thinking about like and he has written a book recently on degrowth he's he's he's comes from development studies now and he's precisely trying to think of what meaning can the things we're talking about degrowth could they have in the context of South Africa how can they connect to political discussions debates and alternatives that they have been going for decades also in your part of the world okay as we are waiting for more questions okay here is a good question again from Jules is there any value in pushing individual behavior changes in degrowth I feel that in Belgium or France there is already a degrowth discourse but what it is focused on but which is focused on good behavior and even towards hermit-like lives detached from the rest of society yes that's what we try to articulate in in our books the case for degrowth that I said very briefly so we we talked there about the articulation of the personal the communal and the political so personal change is necessary so we can't we can't pretend that we can just like do whatever we were doing you know and then we don't make any personal change and we say okay it's just a system that has to change we're gonna wait for the system to change and then so there is some value in the dictum that says like live start living in terms of the change you want to see of course not all of us have the privilege to be able to live differently and we don't have the flexibility so we have to understand that this is also a privilege to fight for to limit ourselves in a sense no that there are many people the majority of people live day in day out even in the overdeveloped high income economies and it's a matter of having the options to to live differently so living differently is important it is important in sense of starting this change seeing showing that it is possible but also cultivating what we call the common sense now that a different way of living is possible and is also happy you're not like a miserable person living this way now if you do that and you're right as if you do that and you just isolate and you become a clan of the growth or is living the growth way outside and you're looked as hippies you're not doing anything the question is like you stay in society and that's the difficult part because then you start having contradictions now because in order to be part of society you have to play also by other rules and then you start having to deal with contradictions you can't be a puritan in that sense now being the part of society and communalize that so it's not just you it's you and others that you create also common structures to thinking about here in Barcelona there are cooperatives of food for example people who have self-organized and they bring their food from local producers in the vicinity of Barcelona and they've made cooperatives so you live differently you consume different food you spend your time differently but you do it with others and then others that might not be exactly the growthers or haven't read about the growth I say okay this cooperative actually produces better food no I might join it just because I want healthier food and then they join it and they get part of this process and then there is the next level so when they become part of this process then you convince them also to vote for other column in the next elections you know so you become also a political movement so it's this articulation of the personal the communal and the political that it's crucial so the personal is part of the equation we shouldn't underestimate it and we shouldn't just make fun of it many times now because people live differently but we should criticize people who just live differently now because that's clearly not enough I think the next question from Sebastian almost follows on from this one where Sebastian is asking is it realistic for individual communities or cities to pursue degrowth strategies if they are embedded within a focused capitalist national economy yeah I mean that's yes yes that's yes that's that's that's the most difficult part now so how does how does saints come about now especially within a system that you have to grow or die and even municipal authorities depend on revenue from from taxing profitable activity so there is a whole set of imperatives within capitalist economy so the question is like how do we say how does a slow revolution unfolds there and I don't think I'm I'm the best person to answer that there are much bigger minds who have dealt with that so the question applies to everyone who wants to see something different something different outside of capitalism or beyond capitalism emerging from within capitalism so how do we move from here to there and I don't think this is a question that applies only to to degrowth to the extent that we as in our degrowth books we have tried to address with that as I said we have articulated sorry because my I see my my my power going down and we have articulated that I'll have to fix my my my energy my my power when I finish the answer yeah we have articulated in terms of the different strategies of confrontation but also cultural change because we don't believe in confrontation and political political change and without cultural change without having built the mass of people that they want to see the political change happening now I don't think this will be a smooth process of just political process or electing the say like-minded municipal authorities in power that's not enough so it's going to be through conditions and circumstances not of our own choosing that we would have to be ready with the right ideas and the right political dynamics to let to to have that happen but I think we are entering if we were to write like Hobsbaw now have this very big period you know of hundred years I mean we are entering a period of disasters might be epidemic disaster might be climate disasters that the conditions are going to change dramatically and what is going to emerge there I think we have to be a little bit less deterministic of what is going to be possible within this context I have a couple of small questions for you one is you know sometimes you read Portugal has 60% of its energy consumption in 2020 came from renewables or on certain days of you know in 2017 it was 51% there are also information that you might get on a random date that the Netherlands today was 100% based on off-grid production of energy and so forth yeah so as I know and I sort of agree with you that you know techno fixes such as let us make energy differently while doing the same things that we do etc you know are in some ways not not not not the kind of way forward but are these good measurements of transition from let us say the kind of energy reliance we have to a different kind of energy economy because it has a lot of other implications as well including for example on living together and so forth and the second one is that you know there are as I'm sure you're aware in places like Belgium and so forth there's a fair amount of experimentation I can't hear your spirit Subaru you turned us from August what I'm saying is that in places like Brussels and I'm sure in many other places as well there are lots of experiments for the urban commons which are going on and we have normally thought of the commons as being rural or you know somewhere remote etc and I see that in your closing slides you were talking about you know kind of bringing the commons into the conversation as well so you know most of the world's population is now urban more than 50 percent that is likely to you know sort of increase further how do you see this kind of dynamic this my second question which is that the commons has to be thought of increasingly as an urban thing rather than how we naturally or you know traditionally have thought of it as a rural thing yeah and no renewable energy I think is is what's the Latin thing Sinaq or none other than without it no so I'm not questioning that but I mean the figures you're saying is just a single day if you take it throughout the year and it's a day that you know there was a lot of sand the network just needed that demand must supply I mean the big problem with renewables is for example storage you know that they produce a lot of energy when you don't need it and they don't produce when you need it so you have to need to still run other sources that they need to to run all the time so the question is not whether we need renewables we need renewables of course but the question is like is it easier to do that with the current energy use that we use and try to decarbonize the system or it's going to be easier with two or four times more within 30 years which is like what three percent growth per year means like and this is where we ask for a question Julia Steinberger and colleagues have shown for example that we can satisfy basic needs of for global population basic needs in energy with a fraction of the energy that is being used right now of course in a let's say in a sufficient matter not not with with excesses of energy etc and it's it's it's like a thought experiment or a mathematical model exercise now but it shows that there is a lot of scope of also reducing energy use and in doing so making easier let's say the job of decarbonizing the energy supply because right now the job of decarbonizing an energy supply that keeps growing at three percent per years like it's like impossible I've used the metaphor you try to run up hill on a downward scale that goes faster and faster you know you have to you go at the same speed impossible and commons yes the way I understand commons maybe didn't come out clear in my talk I understand on a more expanded notion which I think is the way most scholars of the commons now or at least as scholars they like talk about it so yes the initial commons studied by Eleanor Ostrom were rural were like pre capitalist commons or I'd say outside of capitalism commons or things that were done outside users coming together to do things I think there's now a much more expanded understanding an interesting theory of the commons as common you know people coming together and sharing resources and creating self institutions of self-governance out of a variety of scales and places from rural areas and resources to thinking about something like wikipedia or a velinus system to thinking about occupied squares or settlements for helping refugees or an occupied school or an urban garden now so and I think it's it's really analytically potent and politically potent to start thinking of these things as commons and the fact that it's politically potent again going back to my city in Barcelona perhaps I went very fast through that but that it is politically potent it is evident that the movement that emerged here out of all these new cities which is in a city there are city initiatives now of alternative economies cooperatives etc and actually the major was an activist of trying to stop house evictions now after the financial crisis of 2008 the framing that this political movement took was a party for the commons and many of the things that it tried to do was to communalize or cooperate devise infrastructures of the city so I do think that's a very potent analytically and politically way of thinking around the commons okay thanks very much okay here is one from Carlos T the last book by David Bolia and silka helfrig is quite good on the commons it links the commons to the pluriverse as well thanks very much that Carlos actually I'm writing on the commons and I didn't know about this so I'm going to steal that reference from you let me quickly cut and paste okay any further questions from you know that you would like to ask Yorgos before he goes off to his one year old twins okay if if there is nothing else coming then I'd like to thank you very much Yorgos for coming uh it's a pleasure uh you know because uh we had you know some interactions while you were here and I can see some of the ideas that we were talking about in those days coming out maybe that came out in actually no let me say something let me say something I didn't say the anecdote that actually the idea for the mouse book was born from a from a lecture on the same uh seminar series that I'm now the development studies one so there was a lecturer who she had I think the same title she was why Malthus was wrong but she she she gave an explanation that I didn't agree with you know uh so she gave the she gave it was a socialist take was on Venezuela and Cuba and was saying like okay well Malthus was wrong because he didn't see that actually socialist government can't produce a lot and then there is not scarcity you know and I said I agreed to her up to a point but then I didn't agree with the final steps he took and uh and then I went back home and I was like I want to write something about it then I talked to God as Dale to tell me have you read the essay of Malthus you know he actually is a growthist he's not and uh and then my wife told me you know you have to write the book that you feel really passionate about then I said okay that's what I feel passionate about Malthus and all this constant argument even by people that politically I feel I'm part of the same thing that they reproduce the same argument about Malthus and the response that I find was problematic so the very seminar we are now might be the beginning of a book for someone who disagrees vehemently with me you know that's what we do seminars for so that you can figure and finish writing a book okay thanks so much there and you know I'll be in touch with you regarding some of what you said because obviously you know as you can imagine there's a lot of interest in this sort of thing within our students and our colleagues and I wish you all the best it's very nice to see you after quite a while and take care and have a good rest of the evening and thanks to everyone who joined in you know to listen to this excellent talk as I said there will be a recording of this available soon on youtube I'll send you you know yogas a link to that one okay thank you superian thanks everyone for staying take care then everyone bye bye